When hurricanes hit Florida decades ago, they tended to wipe out a lot of mangroves. Now they wreck condominiums. Drought in the American Southwest imperils not a small gambling town called Las Vegas but one of the world's most popular tourist destinations. If an earthquake hits Taiwan, it cripples the world's semiconductor industry.
And in the wake of these problems, policymakers aren't always straight with the public. The standard political pitch to the public, Hooke says, is, "You're living in a fantasy world, and I can keep your fantasies alive four years longer than my opponent."
A tornado touches down in Virginia last month, one of several local twisters spawned by the remnants of Hurricane Ivan.
(Tony Warren)
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Apocalypse When
And now, let's talk about serious, white-knuckle calamity.
The respected astronomer Martin Rees catalogues potential horrors in his scary book "Our Final Hour," with global warming-driven catastrophes listed alongside physics experiments gone awry ("a hypothetical strangelet disaster could transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across") and nanotechnological bugs that turn the planet into a lifeless gray goo. Each individual type of risk might be of low probability, but cumulatively, the risks facing the planet are the greatest in our history, Rees argues.
The King of Disaster is surely McGuire, the London professor, who is author of such apocalyptic books as "A Guide to the End of the World."
McGuire writes that global warming will certainly result in more natural disasters, but he is most concerned with freak events such as volcanic "super-eruptions," "earthquake storms" and tidal waves that wipe out entire coastlines. He predicts that global warming will lead to more rainfall on oceanic islands, triggering landslides that, in turn, produce these catastrophic tsunamis. He worries about a possible lateral collapse of a volcano in the Canary Islands, one that could send tidal waves across the ocean, where focusing effects in bays and estuaries might raise the wave heights to more than 150 feet as they head toward New York, Baltimore and Washington.
"The major natural catastrophes are 100 percent certain. The sorts of things Martin Rees writes about may or may not happen," McGuire said in a phone interview.
Humans have no cultural memory, he notes, of the last volcanic super-eruption. It happened 73,500 years ago when a volcano named Toba erupted and hurtled dust and ash 50 kilometers high, to the boundary of space. The ejected material was equal to 100 Mount Pinatubos, he says. The cataclysmic global climate change may have killed all but a few thousand human beings, he said. If it happened again, he writes in his book, "From London to Lagos the law of the jungle would likely prevail as individuals and families fought for sustenance and survival."
Kill or be killed. Adapt or die.
You have to wonder: Will there still be a Weather Channel when we live by the law of the jungle?
